Page 2 of 2 SAUDI BOMBSHELLS, Part 1 Al-Qaeda excluded from suspect list
By Gareth Porter
would have allowed US investigators to verify key elements of the accounts. In
fact, Saudi officials refused even to reveal the names of the detainees who
were alleged to have made the confessions, identifying the suspects only by
numbers one through six or seven, according to a former FBI official involved
in the investigation.
Justice Department lawyers argued that the confessions were completely
unreliable, and unusable in court, because they had probably been extracted by
torture. At Attorney General Janet Reno's insistence, both Reno and FBI
Director Louis Freeh said
publicly in early 1997 that the Saudis had provided little more than "hearsay"
evidence on the bombing.
There were also major anomalies in the alleged confessions of Shi'ite plotters
that should have aroused the suspicions of FBI investigators.
The Saudis claimed that on March 28, 1996, Saudi guards at the al-Haditha
border crossing with Jordan had discovered 38 kilograms of plastic explosives
hidden in a car driven by a Saudi Hezbollah member. That member not only
admitted to his Saudi Hezbollah membership, according to the Saudi account, but
led the secret police to three more Saudi Hezbollah members, who were allegedly
arrested on April 6, 7 and 8.
What was peculiar about that account is that on April 17, 1996, Saudi officials
had announced that they had found explosives in a car at the border with Jordan
on March 29, and said that "a number of people" had been arrested. And four
days later, Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef had announced the arrest of
four men in the bombing of the Office of the Program Manager of the Saudi
National Guard in Riyadh on November 13, 1995. Their confessions were broadcast
on Saudi television that same day.
In the announcement of the arrests, reported by the New York Times, Nayef
referred to the arms smuggling attempt of March 29, saying it was still not
clear if the November blast in Riyadh and the smuggling attempt were related.
That statement had clearly implied that Saudi officials had reason to believe
that there was a link between the jihadist network believed to have carried out
the Riyadh bombing and those who had been caught after the March 29 explosive
smuggling attempt.
After the Khobar bombing, however, the Saudis began to link the interception of
explosives in late March to the Shi'ite they were saying had carried out the
Khobar Towers bombing.
One day in July, according to a former Clinton administration official, Freeh
came into the White House situation room livid with anger, telling officials
there he had just learned that the Saudis had arrested a Saudi Hezbollah
activist in March with concealed explosives and had discovered the Shi'ite plot
to bomb Khobar Towers.
Nayef's statement suggesting a possible tie to the Riyadh bombing of the
previous November was a deliberate deception of the United States, which the
Saudis never explained to US officials. "We asked why they didn't tell us about
this earlier and didn't get an answer," says Williams.
If the Saudis had actually arrested the four Saudi Hezbollah members who had
been ordered to carry out the bombing, as they later claimed, it would have
been known immediately to the rest of the Saudi Hezbollah organization, which
would obviously have called off the bomb plot and fled the country.
Further undermining the Shi'ite explosives smuggling and bomb plot story is the
fact that the Saudis had secretly detained and tortured a number of veteran
Sunni jihadists with ties to bin Laden after the bombing.
The Sunni detainees over Khobar included Yusuf al-Uyayri, who was later
revealed to have been the actual head of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. In 2003,
al-Uyayri confirmed in al-Qaeda's regular publication that he had been arrested
and tortured after the Khobar bombing.
A report published in mid-August 1996 by the London-based Palestinian newspaper
Al Qods al-Arabi, based on sources with ties to the jihadi movement in Saudi
Arabia, said that six Sunni veterans of the Afghan war had confessed to the
Khobar bombing under torture. That was followed two days later by a report in
the New York Times that the Saudi officials now believed that Afghan war
veterans had carried out the Khobar bombing.
A few weeks later, however, the Saudi regime apparently made a firm decision to
blame the bombing on the Saudi Shi'ite.
According to a Norwegian specialist on the Saudi jihadi movement, Thomas
Hegghammer, in 2003 - shortly before al-Uyayri was killed in a shoot-out in
Riyadh in late May 2003 - an article by the al-Qaeda leader in the al-Qaeda
periodical blamed Shi'ites for the Khobar bombing.
In a paper for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, Hegghammer cites
that statement as evidence that al Qaeda wasn't involved in Khobar. But one of
al-Uyayri's main objectives at that point would have been to stay out of
prison, so his endorsement of the Saudi regime's position is hardly surprising.
Al-Uyayri had been released from prison in mid-1998, by his own account. But he
was arrested again in late 2002 or early 2003, by which time the CIA had come
to believe that he was a very important figure in al-Qaeda, even though it
didn't know he was the leader of al-Qaeda in the peninsula, according to Ron
Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine.
In mid-March 2003, Suskind writes, US officials pressed the Saudis not to let
him go. But the Saudis claimed they had nothing on al-Uyayri, and a few weeks
later he was released again. The head of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi
secret police were playing a complex game.
The question of how the alleged plotters got their hands on roughly 5,000
pounds of explosives - the estimated amount in the truck bomb - was one of the
central questions in the investigation of the bombing. But interviews with six
former FBI officials who worked on the Khobar Towers investigation revealed
that the investigation had not turned up any evidence of how well over two tons
of explosives had entered the country.
Not one of the six could recall any specific evidence about how the alleged
plotters got their hands on that much explosives. And one former FBI official
who continues to defend the conclusions of the investigation flatly refused to
tell this writer whether the investigation had turned up information bearing on
that question.
If the Saudi Hezbollah group had actually been plotting to bring the explosives
into the country by hiding them in cars, they would have had to get more than
50 explosives-laden cars past Saudi border guards who were already on alert.
There is no indication, however, that any additional cars with explosives came
across the border in the weeks prior to the bombing.
PART 2:Why US officials blamed Iran
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
(The series was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.)
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